The human heart is an amazing organ. A muscle only about the size of your fist, it sits just to the left of the center of your chest contracting and relaxing to pump blood, roughly 5 liters a minute throughout your body. It is an involuntarty muscle. Unlike the muscle in your arm that you flex voluntarily when you lift something, your heart needs no instruction. It operates independently and continuously, day and night, week in, week out, year after year. When it stops, life stops.

What Is Heart Disease

The heart tough, but it’s not invulnerable and it can be afflicted by a variety of diseases. But what is commonly called heart disease is, interestingly enough, not a disease of the heart at all. At least not directly. It’s a disease of the large arteries outside the heart that supply the smaller vessels that feed the heart muscle with blood rich nutrients and oxygen that the heart needs to keep working. Other vessels carry away the waste products produced by the heart in the course of its work. Coronary arteries, the large arteries carrying blood to the heart muscle, are like the huge pipes that carry water from a reservoir to a big city, to be distributed to streets, individual houses, and then specific faucets before being carried away again through drains. If something happens to those big pipes that blocks the flow of vital water to the city, the city shuts down in no time at all. Your heart needs an open system of pipes to maintain an unabated flow of blood all the time.

When the heart works harder, such as during exertion or stress, it needs even more blood flow. It gets this greater flow because, unlike water pipes, the blood vessels can dilate, or open larger, when the need arises. When something impedes that flow, it causes immediate problems for the heart muscle, which becomes starved of oxygen and nutrients.

With heart disease, the “something” that restricts the flow is an accumulation of fatty deposits including cholesterol that form thick plaques on the interior walls of the coronary arteries, a process that can slow the flow of blood to the heart. This condition called atherosclerosis, occurs gradually and may go unnoticed for years.

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